Conventionally, a technique has been developed wherein two cameras are mounted at a vehicle and take photographs of frontward images. Then, using those photographed images, the distance to objects at the front of the vehicle is measured.
With this technique, based on the distance between the object and the vehicle, an alarm is emitted from a display or the speakers, to the driver and the crew. Also, the vehicle's travel motions are controlled through control devices such as the brake or the engine.
For such vehicle controls, in particular, identifying whether the object at the vehicle's front is a pedestrian or not is an important element of the technique.
Regarding a vehicle periphery observation device mentioned in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-284057, an image photographed via an infrared radiation camera is processed and whether a pedestrian at the front is detected. An alarm is emitted when the possibility of a collision between the detected pedestrian and the vehicle is high.
However, the vehicle periphery observation device of this patent literature presupposes the use of an infrared radiation camera, and its image processing is done based on the heat emitted by the human body. Because of this, there is a concern that the accuracy of the pedestrian detections may fall, due to environmental fluctuations from day-night changes or the seasons.
In other words, as an example when the temperature difference between the human body and the surrounding ambient atmosphere is small, the efficiency of this observation device drops, and there is a fear that the pedestrian will not be properly detected.
An object of the present invention is to devise the high accuracy identification of pedestrians, with data based on images.
Additionally, another object of the invention is to devise the speeding up of the above-mentioned pedestrian identification, while controlling the operational load to be smaller.